Our next in the series ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’ returns to the V&A Museum and the film that focuses on the dealer Dean Tuck – you can see the final version of the film HERE.
The focus on a dealer such as Dean Tuck was unusual for the Year of the Dealer project films primarily because Tuck’s acquisition of the Hans Holbein the Younger portrait miniature of Anne of Cleves predated the establishment of the V&A Museum in the early 1850s – Tuck acquired the miniature in 1826, as the YoD film indicates. Tuck was one of only two dealers featured in all 50 films whose sale of objects predate 1850 – the other is Thomas Walesby, who bought and sold the famous four-poster bed from Stowe House in 1848 and features in Lady Lever Art Gallery films (you can see the Walesby film HERE).
However, we wanted to highlight that ‘antique dealers’ and ‘antique dealing’ has a history that predates the establishment of ‘decorative art’ museums in the 1850s – plus we just loved the portrait miniature that Dean Tuck bought and sold!
As with all the other films in the YoD series we had many more images that we might have included in the Dean Tuck film – we had a few images of ‘antiquarian’ interiors for example. This one (below), a beautiful pen and ink drawing of the library at Bromwell House, Brislington, near Bristol, c.1825, which shows the kind of interiors that were fashionable with antiquarian collectors of the type that Dean Tuck would have supplied in the 1820s and 1830s.
We eventually settled on the E.W. Cooke, The Antiquary’s Cell (1835), primarily because the painting is also in the collections of the V&A Museum. One other thing we could not find space to mention in the film is that the 17th century chair in the middle of Cooke’s painting is believed to have been the chair sold to Cooke by the antique dealer’s Edward and George Hull of Wardour Street, London, in 1835 – for more on Hull see my Biographical Dictionary and Nineteenth Century Antique and Curiosity Dealers (free, online at White Rose Research Online HERE).
There were other aspects of Dean Tuck’s life as a dealer in the 1820s and 1830s that we did not have space to include. For example, Tuck had a close business relationship with the famous art and antiques dealer Henry Farrer (1798-1866); they bought and sold lots of antiques together. Farrer was also Executor in Dean Tuck’s Last Will and Testament in 1838.
The other reason we wanted to include Dean Tuck in the V&A films is that his wife, Charlotte Tuck, continued his antique dealing business after his death and one of the themes in the Year of the Dealer films, as you will have noticed, is on women antique dealers and we wanted to highlight that this history also has a long genealogy.
Watch out next week for another ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’.
Mark
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